Technology Is Making Huge Changes In The World Of Agriculture

Alex Knapp
,
Forbes Staff
I write about the future of science, technology, and culture.

Earlier this month, FORBES held its second AgTech Summit, showing off the varieties of technologies that are changing the future of farming, from big data to robots to satellites to machine learning to benevolent fungi.

In this week's episode of The Premise, we talked to Julie Borlaug, the granddaughter of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Norman Borlaug, who's carrying on the family legacy by pushing innovation in agriculture to ensure we can feed the future.

Credit: Spensa Tech

We also talked to Kim Nicholson, the VP of Business Development for Spensa Technologies. They manufacture the "Z-Trap," a device that replaces the painstaking work of estimating pest populations by hand with real-time data. The Z-trap is capable of not only collecting bugs, but it zaps them with electricity in a way that allows the species of bug to be identified, making it much more efficient for farmers to control pests in their fields.